1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an H.264 coding technology, and more particularly, to a video encoding apparatus allowing for enhanced video encoding speed according to the H.264 video coding standard.
2. Description of the Related Art
The international organizations for video coding standards, International Telecommunication Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) and International Standards Organization (ISO), jointly constructed the joint video team (JVT) and presented H.264, which is a standard for video compression.
Like existing video coding standards, the H.264 standard constructs an estimation signal by a motion estimation for a previous frame that has already been encoded, constructs an estimation error signal by mixing a motion compensation with a discrete cosine transform (DCT).
In order to improve compression capability, the standard H.264 performs the motion estimation up to a 4×4 block size smaller than that used in known coding systems and the motion compensation up to a ¼ pixel unit. The H.264 video coding standard based on these technologies has twice as high a compression capability as that of a known video coding standard, the Moving Picture Experts Group-4 Advanced Simple Profile (MPEG-4 ASP).
However, video coding technology based on the H.264 standard requires wide memory bandwidth and high design complexity when realized, so that there is difficulty in creating real-time applications. Particularly, since motion estimation based on a ¼ pixel unit is more complicated than that based on a ½ pixel unit, efficient pixel interpolation and motion estimation as well as wide memory bandwidth are required.